Paper info

THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF SUPPLIERS IN THE NEW SERVICE CONCOMITANCE

Antonella Carù, Enzo Baglieri and Stefano Pace

The paper was published at the 24th IMP-conference in Uppsala, Sweden in 2008.

The concomitance arises within the literature about service marketing as the simultaneous fruition of a service in the same place from a plurality of people. Such concomitance has been considered frequently as a negative side effect of service and it has not been deeply investigated in the last twenty years. Nowadays, technology allows to broaden the notion of concomitance to its positive meaning. Information & Communication Technologies enable more users to gather simultaneously in virtual places (whether in the Internet or in other platforms) and interact. This idea is linked to customers that, as the recent trends of marketing and consumer behaviour illustrate, looks for connections among them. Concomitance, seen in this light, is an opportunity for innovation and not an operational constraint. That is why the paper focuses on the role of suppliers in supporting a company in its innovative project of a new concomitant service.We empirically refere to the development of the first European service of mobile TV, recently introduced in Italyby the company 3 Italia. Mobile TV is a new service and it presents the challenges of concomitance. In order to develop such a new service, 3 Italia has created a net of strategic suppliers. Through the case study of 3 Italia and the comparison with its competitors, the paper illustrates how the company selected and manage this new network of strategic suppliers.